My research focuses on ethnic and racial diversity in education. The question I am concerned with is: what effect does implicit bias have on academic performance of students? I was lucky enough to find a very interesting topic in the very first source that I looked at while conducting this research. I stumbled upon a chapter of a book (the chapter was titled “Diversity”) and in this piece of writing I was introduced to implicit theories of intelligence. This essentially is where someone has biases towards people and treat them differently depending on what their ethnic background is: for instance a teacher may treat white kids better because they assume they will be “smarter” and do well with classwork, while a group of indigenous kids get overlooked. The indigenous kids may not fare as well on exams, but may have a whole different sphere of knowledge and intelligence, one that the white kids may not have.
Looking for sources (mostly through Syracuse Libraries Summon site, and JSTOR, but also Google Scholar) I found a lot of different chapters, articles and studies about diversity in education. From there I specifically looked for biases within academia and found quite a bit- sources that had to do with university administration and their attempts at installing diversity coalitions at school (and ultimately failing for the most part), professors picking out students to advise (based on their ethnic background), groups of college students and how their grades were while looking at what their classroom environment consisted of racially, and rural school districts dealing with what is known as “white flight” and how their districts are coping with rapidly changing demographics.
What I would like to find more of are peer reviewed studies that are not skewed a certain way: The best study that I found (and am using) makes a really convincing argument that racial diversity has little to no impact whatsoever on how people perform academically. This would be a good piece to use if I was playing devil’s advocate- but when I reread the study, I picked up on the statistics being skewed and not really impartial at all. Most other studies that I have looked through seem to be in the same vein.
The more I look into implicit theories of intelligence and biases that people have, it’s certainly opened my eyes. It’s scary because this almost seems to be an inherently natural behavior that people have and commit subconsciously, and me being someone who plans to go into education and am a white male, I don’t want to fall into this sort of behavior, it seems like systemically there is a disservice being done to women, people of color, disabled people, and people who are part of the LGBTQ community. I plan on digging as deep as I can to find more about this phenomenon.